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Juan Marquezado Quintana owns a radio station in southern Peru, harbours mixed feelings about people in neighbouring Chile, and takes his pisco neat.

In other words, he’s an average Peruvian guy, except for the part about owning a radio station — oh, and also the part about preferring his pisco straight.

That isn’t typical, either. But Marquezado is adamant.

“I like pisco best by itself,” he says, referring to the clear South American brandy that Peruvians claim as their national drink. “I like it very, very pure.”

Many Peruvian tipplers prefer to mix pisco with lime juice, sugar syrup, egg white, Angostura bitters and ice — the classic formulation known as a pisco sour and long claimed by Peruvians as their national cocktail.

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But here’s the problem.

People in neighbouring Chile also claim pisco — pronounced “peace-ko” — as their national drink and pisco sour as their national cocktail.

The two countries have been feuding about the issue for decades, with Peru claiming the exclusive right to produce and market pisco, while Chile demands that it also be allowed to use the name.

The Peruvian claim has been accepted by the World Intellectual Rights Organization, but neither Chile nor the United States — the world’s leading importer of pisco— is a member of that body, so the ruling is ineffective.

Feelings on the subject run especially high in Peru, which has a weaker economy than its southern neighbour and a more troubled history.

“It is raw,” says Jerry Mitchell, a geographer at the University of South Carolina, who co-authored a 2011 academic paper on the long-fermenting dispute. “They’ve been trying to resolve this now for the last half-century.”

Tensions between the two countries extend back even further into history, to a 19th-century war that pitted Peru and Bolivia against Chile.

After five years of battle, Chile defeated its two Andean adversaries, a humiliating outcome that rankles Peruvians to this day.

Even now, more than a century later, Peru and Chile continue to squabble. In September, the International Court of Justice at The Hague is scheduled to rule on a maritime claim that Lima lodged against Santiago five years ago.

But back to pisco.

It would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of the beverage to Peru’s national identity. Go to the Peruvian government’s web page, and you will find a link to a site called Pisco es Peru (Pisco is Peru) that will tell you everything you ever wanted to know about the country’s “flagship liquor.”

“Chileans were not the ones who discovered it,” says Marquezado at the radio station in southern Peru. “Peruvian pisco is pure, pure juice of the grape.”

He’s right on both counts.

As he chats with a reporter by phone, Marquezado is installed in his office in the community of San Clemente, near a tall hill that supports his radio station’s antenna and that overlooks the neighbouring town of Pisco, located near the mouth of the Pisco River, at the foot of the Pisco Valley.

Pisco. Pisco. Pisco.

The Peruvian town by that name dates back to 1574, providing more proof — if more proof were needed — that Pisco es Peru.

Or at least that’s what the Peruvians say.

“It is considered our cultural patrimony,” says Melanie Asher, founder and CEO of Macchupisco, a leading Peruvian producer and exporter of the beverage. “It is very much considered part of our culture.”

She says there is little similarity between Chilean and Peruvian versions of the drink. The Chilean beverage is grappa-like and can be produced cheaply, she says, while Peruvian pisco is closer in form to cognac.

Both countries have strict regulations governing the production of pisco, but they differ on many points. Under the Chilean system, the distilled libation may be diluted with water to reduce its alcohol content before sale. The Peruvian regimen forbids this sort of tampering. Peruvian pisco is distilled from young wine; Chilean pisco, from fully fermented wine. Chilean pisco is sometimes infused with fruit and can have an amber hue, while the Peruvian version is unadulterated and generally colourless.

As a matter of history alone, Peru would seem to have the stronger claim.

After all, the brandy known as pisco has been produced in the Pisco region of southern Peru for 400 years or more — since 1613 at least, when a man named Pedro Manuel died in the city of Ica. Possessions listed in his will included items used in the production of a drink called pisco, including a large copper boiler.

By contrast, the first documented evidence of pisco production in Chile dates no further back than 1871.

Based on this information, you might well conclude that Peru’s case for exclusive ownership of the name is armour-plated. Peruvians invented the drink, they were the first to produce it, and they have a town named Pisco.

But it gets more complicated.

In the first place, way back in 1613 when Pedro Manuel was on his death bed, Peru and Chile were not separate countries. They were two parts of the same territory, both located within the Spanish viceroyalty of Peru, an arrangement that continued into the 19th century.

Besides, Chile also has a town called Pisco, even if its name is something of a put-up job.

In 1936, no doubt anticipating the trademark battles to come, Chile’s president of the day, Gabriel Gonzalez, took the prudent if somewhat cynical step of changing the name of La Union, a town in the pisco-producing region of central Chile, to Pisco Elqui.

“They changed the name of the town to give themselves some heritage,” huffs Asher.

As a result, both countries are able to argue before international trade tribunals and in discussions with their bilateral trading partners that they possess what some call an “appellation of origin” and others refer to as a “ground indication” — in other words, a direct link between the product and the land.

France uses a similar concept, which it calls terroir, in efforts to reserve use of the term “champagne” for sparkling wine produced in the Champagne region of France. The name Roquefort has similar protection for cheese.

In the United States, the term Vidalia onions may be applied only to onions cultivated in the corresponding region of Georgia, while Idaho potatoes may be called by that name only if they were actually grown in Idaho.

In the case of pisco, however, the issue seems to be murkier.

After all, Peru may have been distilling pisco for longer than its southern neighbour, but Chile produces vastly more volume, roughly 50 million litres a year compared with 6.7 million litres.

Chileans drink more pisco, too.

By one estimate, Chileans each quaff two litres of pisco annually, which is roughly 20 times Peru’s per-capita consumption. Chilean exports of pisco are also considerably larger than those of Peru.

Some countries recognize Chile’s claim to use of the name pisco, others accept the Peruvian argument, while still others have signed on to both.

A quick visit to the LCBO’s website reveals that this country’s vaunted international even-handedness prevails even when it comes to South American alcoholic libations. Ontario imports one pisco brand from Chile (Pisco Aba, $26.95 per 750-mL bottle) and one from Peru (Pisco Soldeica, $32.95).

The cocktail is a source of conflict, too. Peru claims to have invented the potion, but so does Chile.

According to the Peruvian version, the tart and dangerously potent concoction was conceived during the 1920s at The Morris Bar, owned by American Victor Morris and located near Lima’s main plaza.

But Chileans insist the cocktail was invented in their country — some say at a bar in the town of Iquique. The Chilean version of the drink resembles the Peruvian recipe, but does not include egg whites or Angostura bitters.

Purists insist they can distinguish a Peruvian pisco from its Chilean counterpart even after it has been poured into an old-fashioned glass and mixed with the other ingredients of a pisco sour, but others are skeptical.

“I have Peruvian friends who swear they can tell the difference,” says Mitchell, the U.S. geographer. “But it’s firewater to me. At that point, it’s a little like vodka. Once you mix it with something, it’s just vodka.”

He could well be right, but it would be unwise to express such an opinion too loudly in either Lima or Santiago, two places where the words “just pisco” might be taken as an offence against national honour.

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